This post was originally posted at Pierced Blog.
I have countless childhood memories of family devotions at home. Most every night of my childhood our family gathered in the living room to read from the Bible or a Bible storybook or a devotional of some kind.
Especially when my brothers and I were younger, we also sang songs and hymns. I can remember singing the song Give Thanks, and my brother Scott and I would run to our rooms and grab our wallets to illustrate the line “may the poor say I am rich.” And of course, we would flex our muscles for the line “may the weak say I am strong.”
And we would pray. Sometimes everyone would pray, sometimes just one person would pray. My brothers and I learned how to pray publicly at home. It was both taught and caught, but mostly caught.
This, then, is a memorial to my parents, for their desire to follow God’s Word and not leave biblical and theological training only to Sunday School and the worship service and AWANA and to Santa Clarita Christian School. Those places left indelible marks on me because of their faithfulness to the truth of the Bible, but I probably learned most about God from the intentional time my parents carved out every night to read, pray and sing.
Recently, my wife Amy and I have made a concerted effort to more faithfully attend to family worship in our home with our two girls. It is remarkable to me how many young people I talk to never had a dedicated family time to reading the Bible, singing and praying to God, which is why I raise the subject here.
And it is those three things (reading, singing, praying) that are stressed in two books I’ve recently read on Family Worship. One is Family Worship: In the Bible, in History and in Your Home by Donald S. Whiney. The other is A Neglected Grace: Family Worship in the Christian Home. In the next week I’ll be posting reviews of those books.
